The Book of Daniel (13 page)

    1947

    A certain importance had come to the household. It was not bad at all. It was almost exciting. He wore his good white shirt with the clip-on bow tie. And his new trousers. He was told to stay clean. And nobody bothered him much. On the kitchen table was a fantastic treasure of cakes and candy: sponge cake, honey cake with thinly sliced nuts in the crust, home-baked layer cake with pink icing. The sponge and honey cake came in paper containers with the edges slightly browned. You peeled the crinkly paper from the slice and then at the end licked the cake stuck to the paper. There were also white cardboard boxes of cookies from the bakery—those little crumbly cookies with dabs of chocolate in the center or sticky maraschino cherries, or green dots. There were boxes of candy
still wrapped; he stacked these boxes in tiers behind the cakes. He played store.

On the stove was a glass pot of coffee with a small light under it. Cups and saucers were arranged on the counter. Every once in a while someone, some woman with a whiff of the street, would come in and smile falsely, cutely, at him and say something stupid and pour a cup of coffee and return with it to the front of the house. Sometimes they would notice the memory glass on top of the icebox, and they would try to look sad. Voices which bothered him filled the house. The chattering flew back into the kitchen like birds. Nevertheless he had to admit it was exciting. The excitement shook the house into harmony. The house, heavy with people, the air made heavy with the voices of people, seemed to sit everything more firmly on the ground. If, for instance, a great storm came up, the house would be less likely to blow away with so many people. A great wind, crying and straining and cursing, would have to work much harder to carry away so many people. These people were like heavy stones to hold the house down. Perhaps a great wind would leave the house alone altogether because it wasn’t just him and his family, but all those other people who had nothing to do with it. Who had nothing to do with it.

Every now and then a man would come into the kitchen and pour whiskey from the open bottle that stood on the counter with three or four tiny glasses around it. He would pour the whiskey into one of the little glasses and gulp the whiskey down and smack his lips or drink a glass of water from the tap. It did not matter to any of these men if the glasses were used. They put the glasses down without washing them, and used them again that way. But they did not immediately become drunk, which was encouraging. They drank whiskey and went back to the front of the house and weren’t drunk, which was a relief. So the bitter volatile smell was endurable. The smell of the coffee was good, and the scent of baking that came out of the cakes was very good—warm and lemony. Like the visitors, all the smells were new, busy smells. They meant that when someone dies, not everyone dies. It was very encouraging to know this. Just because someone you know dies doesn’t mean
you have to die too. It does not mean it is your turn to die right then. He was grateful for this. He was happy. He wondered if all the laughter and chatter from the front of the house meant everyone else was feeling as good as he was. He had noticed when he was answering the door that every person came in with a very sad look on his face, but after a few minutes inside was talking away merrily, chatting and laughing. Maybe they were simply glad his grandma was dead. Because Grandma had died instead of them. Because maybe by dying she used up all the dying for a while so that nobody else would die for a long time. Or maybe everyone was talking and laughing but only pretending to be happy. And only trying to cheer his mother up. And make her not so sad. He went down the hall to the living room to see her. There were ladies from the neighborhood sitting around her and talking merrily, but she was sitting on a little wooden bench and she had no shoes on. That bothered him. She had no shoes on and her hair was not neat. She was sitting in a hunched-over position with her arms across her knees, as if she was on the potty. Her face was all swollen and puffy around her eyes. He stared at her mournfully. She saw him and sat up, holding out her arms. “Here’s my happiness,” she said, smiling through her unfamiliar, puffy face.

He hadn’t wanted to be seen. “Look at that doll,” one of the women said. “He’s getting so big!”

“He’s a good boy,” his mother said. “He’s a very good boy.” She pulled him onto her lap, her skirt rising above her knees as she took him into her arms. She held him tightly.

“Well, that’s something,” another of the women said. “At least she had the blessing of grandchildren.”

“She loved them,” his mother said in an unnaturally soft voice. “For all her troubles she always had time to smile when Danny came into the room. He was her favorite. She never really got to know the baby, but Danny? Danny could do no wrong in her eyes. She was crazy about him.”

“He’s bigger than my Philip,” one of the women said.

He stopped listening. Gradually he loosened his mother’s grip until he judged he could slip away without attracting her attention.

In the front of the living room his father was talking to
some men. His sleeves were rolled up and his tie was pulled down a little and his collar was open. He was smoking a cigar and moving it in the air with his hand as he talked. The afternoon sun was coming through the windows; it shone on his glasses. When the smoke from the cigar came into the sunlight, it became a blue-white color. He tried to watch one segment of smoke as it rippled up from the tip of the cigar and then burst into brilliant blue whiteness and then turned dim, even seeming to disappear as it rose, spreading out, above the planes of sunlight.

“It is unbelievable to me,” his father said, “that the Congress of the United States could pass such an insane bill. It is simple insanity. If the Communist Party doesn’t register it breaks the law. If it does register, it admits to the status of conspiracy to overthrow the United States. It is damned if it does, and damned if it doesn’t. Only insane men could make such a law. Only insane men could expect it to survive in the Courts.” His father laughed in a kind of fake astonishment. His father’s face was flushed and his eyes were bright. He looked very happy and excited.

A man said, “But my dear Isaacson, that this should be unbelievable to you I Do you have a lingering respect for the United States Congress that you are so astonished? Do you expect more from these atavars? Half of them are criminals; and the other half are petty bourgeois profiteers. Every southern Congressman is in office illegally, and each session they all vote to increase the appropriation of the Un-American Activities Committee. What is so unbelievable?”

His father laughed again. The man who spoke sat in the big chair with the edges that came out; so that if you sat back your face couldn’t be seen from the side. He sat with his arms folded across his chest and his feet crossed at the ankles. Daniel had never seen him before.

“The fact is,” the man said, “the politicians are quite aware that the Mundt-Nixon bill is unconstitutional. Furthermore, they know it will not go to a vote in the Senate before the end of the legislative session. Their intent is not to pass a simple bill making the American Communist an outlaw; they are not in a position to do that—yet. Their intent is to stifle and intimidate
the forces of progressivism in this country, to turn back the tide of history, which is, of course, futile. But things will get worse before they get better—the deportations, the contempt proceedings, the blacklists, the jailings—it is all part of the Wall Street conspiracy, it is the reflex of capitalist imperialism trying to shore up its rotting foundations. That is the whole purpose of the so-called “cold war.” That is the whole purpose of our foreign policy since the death of Roosevelt. American capitalism conceives, quite correctly, that it can only survive in opposition to socialist democracy; that is the real meaning of the Truman Doctrine. That is why we ring our socialist ally who won the war in the East and thereby prevented Fascism from engulfing the West—that is why we ring her borders with military bases. That is what you do to a man who does you a favor. You cannot admit your debt, so you find a way to hate him. We made love with Soviet Russia during the war because we needed her. Now we jilt her once again and resume the great conspiracy that has gone on since the very days of the Revolution when American troops occupied Siberia in hopes of restoring Czarist tyranny.”

“A drink?” his father said. “Some coffee?”

“Nothing, thank you. But you see, the domestic aspects of the cold war, all the counterrevolutionary harassment, will have just the opposite effect of what they want. It will only unify and strengthen and broaden the progressive movement in this country. It will open the eyes and politically develop all those who may have otherwise believed that imperialist capitalism is reasonable, and that there are other less radical answers than Marxism-Leninism for the social transformation of America,”

“He speaks so well,” a voice whispered behind Daniel. This was not a judgment he would have made himself. He didn’t like the man. The man was show-offy. He thought he was a big shot. Yet looking at his father, Daniel could tell that his father would agree with the whisper behind him. His father had looked around proudly while the man talked, glad to show the man off to the people in the room. His father sucked on the cigar, his eyes glittering behind the glasses that enlarged them. His face was red under the heavy beard-shadow. He really liked this show-off man.

“Tell me, Isaacson. Surely this is nothing you don’t already know.”

“Yes, in my mind. Of course, I understand what the issues are. But I cannot help being shocked by Fascistic insanity in this country. It bothers me, I cannot help it. Whenever it exhibits itself, it shocks me.”

“And you find it unbelievable … You are still a young man, Isaacson. You are not fully matured. You have a good heart, but it deceives you. If you cannot recognize the forces of reaction and their dialectical inevitability, they become twice as dangerous. It is a terrible mistake to expect any enlightenment from them. Of such errors was the Browder heresy composed. One forgets how young you are.”

His father was blushing wildly. “He only looks old,” said Dr. Mindish, the dentist, who always thought he was so funny. Everyone laughed.

Daniel went outside. He stood on the narrow porch and played his ship game. He was the captain on the bridge of his sailing ship—the house was the ship—and a great storm blew. He held onto the porch railing and squinted his eyes, and swayed slowly as the great storm attacked the ship. He made the sound effect, marvelously real in his own ears, of the mainmast cracking, splintering, and crashing to the deck in a tangle of lines and torn sheets.

It was Sunday afternoon, and the street was empty. He walked down the front steps. At the curb he stepped between two parked cars and looked both ways and then ran across the street to the schoolyard fence. At this end, Weeks Avenue, there was a drop of thirty to forty feet from the street to the schoolyard. The schoolyard was built into the hill that rose from Eastburn Avenue to Weeks Avenue. It was a full city block long, and half a block wide. At the other end, Eastburn Avenue, the schoolyard was level with the street. Once, playing on the porch he had seen a woman walking along the fence right here, coming home past the school. In her arms she had two bags with groceries. As he looked up and saw her, a car skidded up on the sidewalk and smashed her right through the schoolyard fence, and she disappeared. The front end of the car was stuck through the fence, and the wheels turned in the air. The police
came, and there were a lot of people, and when he went across the street to look, the woman was lying down in the schoolyard; she had been carrying bottles of milk in her grocery bags, and the bottles had broken and the milk was mixed with her blood, and glass was in it. She was dead and they carried her to the Eastburn Avenue end in a stretcher, with a blanket over her, and her arm hung over the edge of the stretcher, bobbing up and down as if she was still alive.

His mother said she knew the woman’s daughter. That had been a long time ago. Then they had pulled the car out and washed the schoolyard down below with hoses. A policeman stood by the hole. Then, a few days later, they came and put in a new section of fence that even now was brighter and shinier and more silvery than the rest of the fence. Although not as much as when it was new.

The schoolyard was empty. There had been a grownup softball game this morning, but now in the afternoon, it was so hot no one wanted to be in the sun. There was a long flight of stone steps going up from the yard to the school. That was the entrance for kindergarten to second grade. The school was like a castle. It was purple. It had rows and rows of long windows. It was the largest building he had ever seen. Standing where he was, he could see his classroom which looked over the schoolyard. Sometimes in class he leaned over the big radiator, if it wasn’t hot, and hoisted himself up to the window when the teacher wasn’t looking, so he could see his house.

He turned around. On the porch his mother and father were saying goodbye to the man who was such a big shot. The man shook his father’s hand, tipped his hat to his mother, and went down the steps. His parents watched the man until he disappeared around the corner.

He wondered where the man lived. The man talked the way his father talked, but he was no friend of his father’s. Fathers talked to each other in big words. Of course, he understood that it was about ways of making things better for working people. But what did the talk do to all the houses—it seemed to him that the talk should do something to the houses, but it never did. The houses remained unmoved. The apartment houses rising like steps along 173rd Street from Eastburn Avenue up to
Weeks. The private red-brick houses along Eastburn. The hills of houses all around. Only the schoolyard, like a big square pit, had no houses.

Daniel waited for his mother and father to see him and call to him. His father’s sleeves were rolled up and his mother was in her stocking feet. They turned, and went back in, his hand on her shoulder.